Civil Disobedience

“Civil Disobedience” discusses the need for each individual to decide their own moral code and live up to it. Throughout the essay Thoreau argues that the best form of government is one that allows the most individualism and requires the least from its citizens. He asserts that an individual has a responsibility to ignore laws that go against the higher laws of their conscience or faith. He writes that his only “obligation” is “to do at any time” that which he thinks is right (5). The alternative is to live as part of the machine of government, furthering injustice by doing not what is right but what the law requires. In doing so, men become “servants” to the State or, worse, “machines” (5). They lose their sense of humanity and their freedom. Indeed, as they become more entwined with society, they lose more of their humanity and moral footing each day. Living in society, thus, is a slow death.

Indeed, Thoreau feels most free when he is inside the jail and totally away from the shackles of society, as in jail he is a person the State has punished for exercising his individualism. There he learns to pity the State, which does not understand that he does not want to be “on the other side of that stone wall” because in jail he can simply exist as an individual (18).